View full sizeRoss William Hamilton, The OregonianWilliam Hamilton sought to redefine Christianity without the presence of an all-knowing, all-powerful God.

A deep explosion shattered the afternoon quiet. Young Bill Hamilton looked up the street to see smoke pouring from his friend's house. He
raced to the yard as police, parents and firemen appeared within
minutes.

His teenage friends had been building pipe bombs. One, an Episcopalian
boy, was dead. Another, a Catholic, lay on the grass fatally injured.
And the third, the son of an atheist, emerged without a scratch.

How, he wondered, could a just God allow this? Why do the innocent suffer? Does God intervene in human lives?

"Theodicy came to dwell in my 14-year-old head that Sunday." It was 1938.

The questions haunted William Hamilton
at his friends' funeral, at school, in the Navy, at seminary and in his
years as a theology professor at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. By
1966 he had an answer, and it landed him not only in Time and Playboy
magazines, but also in the middle of a hornet's nest:

God was dead.

That was the only explanation. The Vietnam War divided Americans. Race
riots, civil rights marches, assassinations, the sexual revolution and
women's liberation divided society. Atheism gathered steam as Madalyn
Murray O'Hair won her lawsuit, and the Supreme Court banned organized
prayer in public schools.

In 2007, a new atheism surged. Best-sellers bashed religion,
Christianity in particular. Published excerpts from Mother Teresa's
private journal confessed her doubts. "The Golden Compass," drawn from a
trilogy of novels in which a key character wants to kill God, became a
hit movie.

For Hamilton, 83, who lives in downtown Portland with his wife, it's too late. God's already gone. Hamilton's
own health is fragile. His hands shake. He unfolds his lanky body
slowly as he rises to greet a guest. It is hard to imagine that this
gentle man in a Chicago Cubs sweat shirt shook the world of theology.

Hamilton grew up a "bland, very liberal"
Baptist, in a middle-class suburb of Chicago. "As soon as I was able,"
he says, "I left it." He graduated from Oberlin College in 1943 and
joined the Navy in World War II. "I may have been the only guy on my
ship with a copy of 'The Nature and Destiny of Man' in my duffel," he
says. Its author, Reinhold Niebuhr, was the leading U.S. theologian of the day.

After the war, Hamilton went to Union Theological Seminary in New York City because Niebuhr invited him. It didn't matter that Hamilton
wasn't sure he was a Christian. Niebuhr thought Union, a bastion of
liberal Protestantism, would be a good place to figure that out. The two
became lifelong friends.

Hamilton graduated in 1949 and married Mary
Jean Golden, a tall ballet dancer with auburn hair. They left for the
University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He earned a doctorate in
theology, then they returned to the U.S., and Hamilton taught theology at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., and later at Colgate Rochester Divinity School in upstate New York.

With his wife and two sons settled just a few blocks from campus, he
began to reflect on his fractured faith. The image of God as
all-knowing, all-powerful and the solver of problems couldn't be
reconciled with human suffering, especially in the wake of the
Holocaust. Hamilton wrote out his two choices:
"God is not behind such radical evil, therefore he cannot be what we
have traditionally meant by God" or "God is behind everything, including
the death camps --and therefore he is a killer."

Hamilton didn't see an active God anymore. But the theologian was not an atheist. And he didn't want to let go of Jesus, as the example of how humans should treat one another.

"The death of God is a metaphor," he says. "We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God."

Hamilton stopped going to church. But because
he wanted his children to know the Bible and understand how Jesus lived,
he taught them Sunday school at home.
"We'd gather in the living room with our Bibles," recalls his son, Don,
a journalist. "Dad would ask us to read parts out loud, and then we
would talk about what they meant. And after about half an hour, we'd be
dismissed."

Older brother Ross, a photographer at The Oregonian, doesn't think any
of his siblings --the couple eventually had five children --attend
church. "But all of us appreciate the teachings of Jesus Christ, what an
extraordinary figure he was."

As Hamilton redefined Christianity without God, other theologicans speculated: God died long ago, perhaps at the birth of Jesus; or science and technology killed the deity. Hamilton,
Thomas J.J. Altizer at Emory University and Paul Van Buren at Temple
published a few articles in theological journals. Newspapers picked up
the story in 1965. Time declared God dead on its April 8, 1966, cover
and christened the movement "radical theology."

By the time Hamilton wrote an essay for
Playboy, sharing the August 1966 issue with topless photos of Jane
Fonda, he was frustrated with the public perception of his work. Some
didn't understand his argument or care about its subtleties. The
response to all the publicity was hostility.

"Institutions were upset,
trustees perplexed, colleagues bewildered."

Hamilton doesn't like to talk about what
happened. "There were death threats," his wife, Mary Jean, says. "There
were letters to the editor," remembers his son Don. He watched his
father walk past faculty friends and no one spoke. There were unofficial
calls for Hamilton's resignation. The divinity
school didn't fire him, but it yanked his endowed chair in 1967.
Critics dismissed the death of God movement as a blip, a passing fad.

But Hamilton helped pave the way for other radical theologians: feminists, who dropped patriarchal descriptions of God, and liberationists, who saw God in poverty and suffering.

The news of God's death drifted down to churches, too, says Lloyd
Steffen, a professor of religion at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.
The movement made interfaith dialogue more meaningful, he says. "You
have to let go of an exclusive, male, kingly God in order to have
conversations with other religions."

Hamilton left Colgate to teach religion at New
College in Sarasota, Fla. An avant-garde school, it attracted bright
students and brighter faculty. But after a few years, he and his wife
couldn't imagine raising their five children in such a freewheeling
community. They moved to Oregon in 1970, where Hamilton
taught at Portland State University for 14 years. His classes covered
topics from literary criticism to death and dying, even a little
religion. He often spoke at churches.

Bill and Susan Sack of Northwest Portland knew him first as a teacher and then a friend. Hamilton encouraged them to live according to Jesus' words. Susan Sack took 17 courses from Hamilton at PSU. He encouraged her to read, write --and think --more deeply. For her husband, Hamilton brought Scripture to life.
Says Bill Sack, "He can read the Sermon on the Mount and bring you to your knees."

Hamilton rises every day at 6 a.m. to write.
He writes by hand, and progress is slow. He hopes, however, to get his
novel off to a publisher soon. He still reads avidly, about Shakespeare,
politics, some theology and the new atheists. Their writing is uneven,
but it's their attitude that annoys him most.

"These are blanket indictments of religion in general, or Christianity
in particular," he says. "There is a self-righteousness, a glibness in
their writing. They are too sure of themselves. They've backed
themselves into a fundamentalist mode."

He remains a Christian who doesn't go to church. And faced with his own
mortality, he doesn't think much about God anymore, except when asked.

"The death of God enabled me to understand the world. Looking back, I wouldn't have gone any other direction. "I faced all my worries and questions about death long ago."